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Archive for November, 2008

If you are using or trying out SQL Server 2008 Reporting Services, you may have noticed that clicking on the “Report Builder” link on the Report Manager toolbar in Internet Explorer still opens up the old “ClickOnce” report builder tool originally supplied with Reporting Services 2005.

For some time now there have been various preview and CTP releases of Report Builder 2.0, a re-written version of the tool specifically for Reporting Services 2008, with an Office 2007 style “fluent” interface, as you can see here:

The good news is that Report Builder 2.0 has now been released and is available as a download from here. Certainly there seem to be several improvements over the previous report builder which I never found particularly intuitive. One big change is that you no longer need to have a pre-built report model – Report Builder 2.0 can connect directly to SQL Server, Analysis Services and non-MS products such as Oracle or SAP Netweaver.

And if you are developing BI or reporting solutions in conjunction with SharePoint, don’t forget there is a downloadable Reporting Services Add-in for SharePoint Technologies, which provides among other things report viewer web parts, subscription management and version control (you can also publish your reports to SharePoint directly from Report Builder 2.0). Lots of useful info on these features on Reza Alirezaei’s blog.

This is a one-day event being held at Microsoft’s UK headquarters in Thames Valley Park Reading UK. I’m going to be presenting a session on “Adding Business Intelligence to your Access/SQL Server Projects”, and aiming to provide an introduction to SQL Server Analysis Services and Integration Services. I know that lots of Access fans use the product for reporting and analysis against substantial databases, particularly SQL Server. In many cases the next logical step is to look at the multi-dimensional capabilities of Analysis Services, so I’m aiming to show how to get started with the various tools, and how to get your data into shape for “dimensional modelling”.